Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Kickoff time?

Technovelgy, an amazing site that tracks new ideas from science fiction, has picked up on a meme from my story "The Sun Also Explodes," included in Lou Anders' acclaimed new anthology Fast Forward 2. The new entry (including a short excerpt):

Crile scratched his silvery buzzcut, flexing a biceps that pulsed with the texture of manufactured tendons and polymerically enhanced blood vessels. He was one of the alpha generation of real celebrity cyborgs, a Texas star college quarterback who was among the first to go straight to the UFL.

The Ultimate Football League was the first to abandon professional athletics' anachronistic insistence on the prohibition of performance enhancements, be they pharmaceutical, biomechanical, or genetically engineered. It was a genius stroke by the founders. The audience was far more interested in superhuman performances than fidelity to nature, and the athletes were addicted to the potential of even greater power.

That's a wonderful memetic pickup for what was mainly included as backstory of a secondary character. Perhaps because it is so likely to actually happen, probably sooner than you think.